Freethinker: : one that forms opinions on the basis of reason independently of authority; especially : one who doubts or denies religious dogma
By all means let's be open-minded,
but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.Richard Dawkins, in "Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder,"

Friday, September 24, 2010

This is so ridiculous I can’t believe that this is even being taken seriously in the news media at all. It’s unbelievable that in the year 2010 we are still having these sorts of debates and arguments about a boogieman who is overlord of the underworld and is just out to make people take political stances on issues that are against the will a particular segment of Christianity. Mind boggling!

Kenyn Cureton is worried that you might be. Cureton is vice president for church ministries for the Family Research Council. During the FRC’s recent “Values Voter Summit,” he warned attendees at a breakout session on churches and politics to be ready for some intense action.“The battle that we’re fighting,” he said, “is not just a political and cultural battle, it’s a spiritual battle.”

And when a battle is spiritual, you can be sure that some people are serving the wrong side.

“When you think about it, you know, the real enemy is not the poor, deluded souls who are advancing these evil agendas,” Cureton said. “Really, they’re just simply pawns in the hands of their malevolent master. They’re simply doing the bidding of the devil, OK?”

So here’s how it goes: You either agree with the Religious Right on issues like abortion, same-sex marriage, church-state relations and so on or you’re buddies with Beelzebub!

The religious right seem to think they have the monopoly on values, and I personally am sick of it.

We are all “values voters.” Those of us who disagree with the Religious Right’s narrow theology and burning desire to “Christianize” (as you define Christian) this nation have values too.

Ours are a little different than yours, Kenyn. We value things like tolerance, diversity, secular government and complete religious liberty for all, supported by the wall of separation between church and state. We value the wisdom of the Founders and will defend it.

We value the Constitution, a document you and your pals in the Religious Right claim to revere but all too often treat like a first draft. (How many amendments does the Religious Right want to add? Let’s see – school prayer, government funding of religious schools, anti-abortion, anti-gay-marriage, “parental rights.” Have I forgotten any?)

It has been said many times that politics is the art of compromise. One of the main problems with the Religious Right’s approach to politics is that it tosses that maxim out the window. How can you compromise with people who are Satan’s imps?

Many political analysts believe that the nation is more polarized than ever. I believe it. Attitudes like Cureton’s go a long way in explaining how we got here.

From what I have been seeing, the religious right no longer even care about how stupid their party’s candidates are, as long as they believe in Christianity, AND the right brand of Christianity.

I have been hearing via email and on FB all the whining from a few fundamentalist Christians I know about this story, and how they believe that the minority should stop standing in the way of what the majority want to do:

The Winston-Salem Journal reported on a situation in King, N.C., where a Christian flag had been included in a veterans’ memorial in the community’s Central Park. An Afghanistan war veteran wanted the city to remove the flag to, as he put it, “bring attention to the fact that regardless of the form of government, it had no right to impose any type of religious belief upon its population.”

On Aug. 11, Americans United wrote a letter to the city urging them to remove the flag. On Aug. 16, the North Carolina ACLU did the same.City officials, after receiving the letters, consulted with their attorney who also agreed that flying the flag of one particular faith violates church-state separation and does not honor all veterans who have fought for our country. The decision was made to remove the flag.

That’s when the whining and boo-hooing started.

Since then, dozens of phone calls and e-mails have poured in from residents complaining about the move. More than 200 people attended a protest rally at the memorial on Monday night, hoping the council will reconsider. Another rally is in the works for next month, too.The anonymous veteran who complained has also been personally attacked.

“What a coward,” someone commented on the Journal’s Web site. “He can face the Taliban but not American citizens who are probably his neighbors?”

It’s appalling to see how many misguided people have pounced on this veteran who not only bravely served this country, but has now also chosen to stand up for the Constitution. What’s worse, their comments prove that many know little about the principles our country is based on.

As the article states, and as we have had arguments about many times with fundamentalist Christians, they mistakenly believe that this country is officially a Christian country. They refuse to educate themselves and just believe what they want to believe, and while they can do that with their fictional god and Bible stories, they can’t just make stuff up about the Constitution and the principles on which this country was founded.

Many Americans seem to be confused and believe that because majority of Americans are Christians that means the United States is a Christian nation. Many seem to think that the majority should be able to vote and take away the rights of the minority. That’s simply not how it works.

. . .and we don’t have to apologize for anything. Start focusing on cleaning up the crimes and perversions in your religion which is still ongoing in TODAY’S WORLD. Stalin, Mao, and all those monsters made religions of their regimes. No organizing of horrendous genocide, wars, or other crimes have been committed in the name of atheism. Atheism is just a lack of god beliefs. Catholicism is indeed an established religion which controls a huge number of people in the name of your god. The Pope is the leader of that Catholic religious empire where great atrocities have been committed in the name of that religion in the past, where great atrocities against children still are ongoing today and are covered up by the Church (though with the coming forward of past victims, and the news media it’s getting more difficult to keep quiet). Your request to have atheists apologize for historical events not related to them is just an attempt to divert attention way from the problems of the Catholic oppressive empire.

The pope cited Hitler today, asking everyone to “reflect on the sobering lessons of atheist extremism of the 20th century.” Immediately, the British Humanist Association got its back up, accusing the pope of “a terrible libel against those who do not believe in God.”

The pope did not go far enough. Radical atheists like the British Humanist Association should apologize for Hitler. But they should not stop there. They also need to issue an apology for the 67 million innocent men, women and children murdered under Stalin, and the 77 million innocent Chinese killed by Mao. Hitler, Stalin and Mao were all driven by a radical atheism, a militant and fundamentally dogmatic brand of secular extremism. It was this anti-religious impulse that allowed them to become mass murderers. By contrast, a grand total of 1,394 were killed during the 250 years of the Inquisition, most all of whom were murdered by secular authorities.

Why should atheists today apologize for the crimes of others? At one level, it makes no sense: apologies should only be given by the guilty. But on the other hand, since the fanatically anti-Catholic secularists in Britain, and elsewhere, demand that the pope—who is entirely innocent of any misconduct—apologize for the sins of others, let the atheists take some of their own medicine and start apologizing for all the crimes committed in their name. It might prove alembic.

No, we don't have anything to apologize for, Bill Donohue. How about Catholics start addressing and doing something about the real and ongoing problems of the Catholic church, and for starters prosecuting the criminals the Vatican protects.

Religion controls our political system like it never has before. The Republicans are quickly destroying the foundations of this country, choosing to dismantle the established separation of church and state. Fifty years ago, on Sept. 12, 1960, President John F. Kennedy gave one of the most important speeches on church and state in American history. Refuting charges that his Catholic religious affiliation would interfere with his presidential duties, Kennedy outlined the proper constitutional relationship between religion and government.

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute; where no Catholic prelate would tell the President — should he be Catholic — how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference, and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him, or the people who might elect him.

I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish; where no public official either requests or accept instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source; where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials, and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.

For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been — and may someday be again — a Jew, or a Quaker, or a Unitarian, or a Baptist. It was Virginia’s harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that led to Jefferson’s statute of religious freedom. Today, I may be the victim, but tomorrow it may be you — until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped apart at a time of great national peril.

Finally, I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end, where all men and all churches are treated as equals, where every man has the same right to attend or not to attend the church of his choice, where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind, and where Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, at both the lay and the pastoral levels, will refrain from those attitudes of disdain and division which have so often marred their works in the past, and promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood.

And here we are fifty years later, and the real issues continue to be obscured by the attempts by the religious to dismantle what has been established by our forefathers and turn us into the United Christian Theocracy of America.

About Me

I love to write, read, paint, draw, take photos, listen to music, travel, and stargaze. If I could live my life over again I would be an astronomer.
“Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.
Arthur C. Clarke